An extraordinary Lucas Davenport thriller from #1  New York Times –bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner John Sandford.   After the events in Gathering Prey , Lucas Davenport finds himself in a very unusual situation—no longer employed by the Minnesota BCA. His friend the governor is just cranking up a presidential campaign, though, and he invites Lucas to come along as part of his campaign staff. “Should be fun!” he says, and it kind of is—until they find they have a shadow: an armed man intent on killing the governor...and anyone who gets in the way. Praise for Extreme Prey “The latest Prey novel is exciting, politically astute, and ultimately terrifying. Sandford and Davenport are in top form.” — Booklist   (starred review)    “Add a hammock under a shady tree, and you've got a quintessential summer read.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune   “Sandford, as always, sets a heart-pounding pace. He permeates his work with wit, an engaging hero readers have come to cherish and a cat-and-rat match that in this case draws on the streak of violence that for years has left a bloody stain on the nation. Timely and troubling, it’s a must-read for thriller devotees and political junkies.” — Richmond Times Dispatch “This guy Sandford is  good .”— St. Louis Post-Dispatch Praise for John Sandford “It appears there is no limit to John Sandford’s ability to keep new breath and blood flowing into his Lucas Davenport series. This is a series you must be reading if you are not already.”— Bookreporter.com   “If you haven’t read Sandford yet, you have been missing one of the great summer-read novelists of all time.”—Stephen King   “Sandford has always been at the top of any list of great mystery writers. His writing and the appeal of his lead character are as fresh as ever.”— The Huffington Post   “Sandford is consistently brilliant.”— Cleveland Plain Dealer John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-six Prey novels; four Kidd novels; eight Virgil Flowers novels; two YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books, most recently Saturn Run . CHAPTER ONE   Bright-eyed Marlys Purdy carried a steel bucket around to the side of the garage to the rabbit hutches, which were stacked up on top of each other like Manhattan walkups. She paused there for a moment, considering the possibilities. A dozen New Zealand whites peered through the screened windows, their pink noses twitching and pale eyes watching the intruder, their long ears turning like radar dishes, trying to parse their immediate future: Was this dinner, or death? A car went by on the gravel road, on the far side of a ditch-line of lavender yarrow and clumps of black-eyed susans and purple cone flowers, throwing a cloud of dust into the late-afternoon sun. Marlys turned to look. Lori Schaeffer, who lived three more miles out. Didn’t bother to wave. Marlys was a sturdy woman in her fifties, white curls clinging to her scalp like vanilla frosting. She wore rimless glasses, a homemade red-checked gingham dress and low-topped Nikes. Short-nosed and pale, she had a small pink mouth that habitually pursed in thought, or disapproval. She popped the door on one of the hutches and pulled the rabbit out by its hind feet. The animal smelled of rabbit food and rabbit poop and the pine shavings used as bedding. A twelve-inch Craftsman crescent wrench, its working end rusted shut, lay on top of the hutches. Marlys stretched the rabbit over her thigh and held it tight until it stopped wriggling, then picked up the crescent wrench and whacked the rabbit on the back of the head, separating the skull from the spine. So it was death. The rabbit went limp, but a few seconds later, began twitching as its nerves fired against oxygen starvation. That went on for a bit and then the rabbit went quiet again. Some years before, Marlys had mounted a plank on the side of the garage, at head-height. Before mounting the board, she’d driven two twenty-penny common nails through it, so that an inch of nail protruded, angling upward. Every year or so, she’d use a bastard file to sharpen up the nails. Now she positioned the bucket, with a used plastic shopping bag on the inside, under the board with the nails. She pushed the dead rabbit’s feet onto the nails, until the nails stuck through; and, in a minute or so, had stripped the rabbit’s fur, pulled off its head, and gutted it, all the unwanted parts and most of the blood draining into plastic bag in the bucket Not all of the blood: a dinner-plate-sized blotch of old black blood stains marred the wooden side of the garage, supplemented by new red blotches from this last butchery. She carried the bloody meat back to the house, paused to tie up the top of the plastic bag and drop it into the garbage can, and in the kitchen, washed the meat. During the entire five-minute process of killing and butchering the rabbit, she’d nev